To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Saturday, February 6, 2016

The Poetry of Osip Mandelstam: A Radio Play by Paul Celan (complete)

Translated from Celan’s German by
Pierre Joris

[Reposted
as a followup to Pierre Joris’s “Thoughts on Osip Mandelstam’s Birthday,” Jacket2,
January 16, 2016.]

1. Speaker: In 1913 a small volume of poetry was published in St. Petersburg, entitled
“The Stone.” These poems clearly carry weight; as the poets Georgij Ivanov and
Nikolai Gumilev admit, one would like to have written them oneself, and yet !
these poems estrange. “Something,” remembers Sinaida Hippius who was
centrally involved in the literary life back then and who had a way with words,
“something had gotten into them.”

2. Speaker: Something strange — as various contemporaries report —
which also applies to the author of the volume, Osip Mandelstam, born 1891 in
Warsaw and who grew up in St. Petersburg and Pawlowsk and about whom it is
known, among other things, that he studied philosophy in Heidelberg and is
presently enamored of Greek.

1. Speaker: Something strange, somewhat uncanny, slightly absurd.
Suddenly you hear him break into laughter ! on occasions where a completely
other reaction is expected; he laughs much too often and much too loudly.
Mandelstam is oversensitive, impulsive, unforeseeable. He is also nearly
indescribably fearful: if, for example, his route leads past a police station,
he’ll make a detour.

2. Speaker: And among all the major Russian poets who survive the
first post-revolutionary decade — Nikolai Gumilev will be shot in 1921 as a
counter-revolutionary; Velimir Khlebnikov, the great utopian of language, will
die of starvation in 1922 — this “scarety cat,” anxious Osip Mandelstam will be
the only defiant and uncompromising one, “the only one,” as the younger
literary historian Vladimir Markov notes, “who never ate humble pie”.

1. Speaker: The twenty poems from the volume “The Stone” strike one
as strange. They are not “word-music,” they are not impressionistic “mood
poetry” woven together from “timbres,” no “second” reality symbolically inflating
the real. Their images resist the concept of the metaphor and the emblem; their
character is phenomenal. These
verses, contrary to Futurism’s simultaneous expansion, are free of neologisms,
word-concretions, word-destructions; they are not a new “expressive” art.

The poem in this case is the poem
of the one who knows that he is speaking under the clinamen of his existence,
that the language of his poem is neither “analogy” nor plain language, but
language “actualized,” voiceful and voiceless simultaneously, set free under
the sign of an indeed radical individuation which, however and at the same
time, remains mindful of the limits imposed on it by language and of the
possibilities language has opened up.

The place of the poem is a human
place, “a place in the cosmos”, yes, but here, down here, in time. The poem –
with all its horizons – remains a sublunar, terrestrial, creaturely phenomenon.
It is the language of a singular being that has taken on form; it has
objectivity and oppositeness, substance and presence. It stands into time.

2. Speaker: The thoughts of the “acmeists” or, as they also call
themselves, the “Adamists,” grouped around Gumilev and his magazines “The
Hyperborean” and “Apollo,” move along the same (or similar) orbits.

1. Speaker: The thoughts.
But not, or only rarely, the poems themselves.

1.
Speaker: “Acme”,
that means the high point,
maturity, the fully developed flower.

2.
Speaker: Osip
Mandelstam’s poem wants to develop what can be perceived and reached with the
help of language and make it actual in its truth. In this sense we are
permitted to understand this poet’s “Acmeism” as a language that has born
fruit.

1.
Speaker: These
poems are the poems of someone who is perceptive and attentive, someone turned
toward what becomes visible, someone addressing and questioning: these poems
are a conversation. In the space of this conversation the addressed
constitutes itself, becomes present, gathers itself around the I that addresses
and names it. But the addressed, through naming, as it were, becomes a you,
brings its otherness and strangeness into this present. Yet even in the here
and now of the poem, even in this immediacy and nearness it lets its distance
have its say too, it guards what is most its own: its time.

2.
Speaker: It is
this tension of the times, between its own and the foreign, which lends that
pained-mute vibrato to a Mandelstam poem by which we recognize it. (This
vibrato is everywhere: in the interval between the words and the stanza, in the
“courtyards” where rhymes and assonances stand, in the punctuation. All this
has semantic relevance.) Things come together, yet even in this
togetherness the question of their Wherefrom and Whereto resounds – a question
that “remains open,” that “does not come to any conclusion,” and points to the
open and cathexable, into the empty and the free.

1.
Speaker: This
question is realized not only in the “thematics” of the poems; it also
takes shape in the language – and that’s
why it becomes a “theme” – : the word –
the name! – shows a preference for
noun-forms, the adjective becomes rare, the “infinitives,” the nominal forms
of the verb dominate: the poem remains open to time, time can join in,
time participates.

2.
Speaker:A poem
from the year 1910:

The
listening, the finely-tensed sail.

The
gaze, wide, empties itself.

The
choir of midnight birds,

swimming
through silence, unheard.

I
have nothing, I resemble the sky.

I
am the way nature is: poor.

Thus
I am, free: like those midnight

voices,
the flocks of birds.

You,
sky, whitest of shirts,

you,
moon, unsouled, I see you.

And,
emptyness, your world, the strange

one,
I receive, I take!

1. Speaker: A poem from the year 1911:

Mellow, measured: the horses’ hoofs.

Lantern-light – not much.

Strangers drive me. Who do know

whereto, to what end.

I am cared for, which I enjoy,

I try to sleep, I’m freezing.

Toward the beam we drive, the star,

they turn – all this rattling!

The head, rocked, I feel it burning.

The foreign hand, its soft ice.

The dark outline there, the fir trees

of which I know nothing.

2. Speaker: A poem from the year 1915:

Insomnia. Homer. Sails, taut.

I read the catalog of ships, did not get far:

The flight of cranes, the young brood’s trail

high above Hellas,
once, before time and

time again.

Like that crane wedge, driven into the most

foreign
–

The heads, imperial, God’s foam on top, humid –

You hover, you swim – whereto? If Helen wasn’t there,

Acheans, I ask you, what would Troy be worth

to you?

Homer, the seas, both: love moves it all.

Who do I listen to, who do I hear? See – Homer falls silent.

The sea, with black eloquence beats this shore,

Ahead I hear it roar, it found its way here.

1.
Speaker: In 1922,
five years after the October revolution, “Tristia,” Mandelstam’s second volume
of poems comes out.

The
poet ! the man for whom language is everything, origin and fate ! is in exile
with his language, “among the Scythians.” “He has” ! and the whole cycle is
tuned to this, the first line of the title poem ! “he has learned to take leave
! a science”.

Mandelstam,
like most Russian poets – like Blok, Bryusov, Bely, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky,
Esenin– welcomed the revolution. His socialism is a socialism with an
ethico-religious stamp; it comes via Herzen, Mihkaylovsky, Kropotkin. It is not
by chance that in the years before the revolution the poet was involved with
the writings of the Chaadaevs, Leontievs, Rozanovs and Gershenzons. Politically
he is close to the party of the Left Social Revolutionaries. For him — and this
evinces a chiliastic character particular to Russian thought — revolution is the dawn of the other, the
uprising of those below, the exaltation of the creature — an upheaval of
downright cosmic proportions. It unhinges the world.

2.
Speaker:

Let us praise the freedom dawning here

this great, this dawn-year.

Submerged, the great forest of creels

into waternights, as none had been.

Into darkness, deaf and dense you reel,

you, people, you: sun-and-tribunal.0,05c hoch

The yoke of fate, brothers, sing it

which he who leads the people carries in tears.

The yoke of power and darkenings,

the burden that throws us to the ground.

Who, oh time, has a heart, hears with it,
understands:

he hears your ship, time, that founders.

There, battle-ready, the phalanx – there, the
swallows!

We linked them together, and – you see it:

The sun – invisible. The elements, all

alive, bird-voiced, underway.

The net, the dusk: dense. Nothing glimmers.

The sun – invisible. The earth swims.0,05c hoch

Well, we’ll try it: turn that rudder around!

It grates, it grinds, you leftists – come on, rip
it around!

The earth swims. You men, take courage, once more!

We plough the seas, we break up the seas.

And to think, Lethe, even when your frost pierces
us:

To us earth was worth ten heavens.

1.
Speaker: The
horizons are darkening – leave-taking takes pride of place, expectations wane,
memory reigns on the fields of time. For Mandelstam, Jewishness belongs to what
is remembered:

This
night: unamendable,

with
you: light, nonetheless.

Suns,
black, that flare up

before
Jerusalem.0,05c hoch

Suns,
yellow: greater fright –

sleep,
hushaby.

Bright
Jewish home: they bury

my
mother dear.

No
longer priesterly,

robbed
of grace and salvation,

they
sing a woman’s dust

out
of the world, in the light.

Jews’
voices, silent they kept not,

mother,
how loud it sounded.

I
wake up in my cot

by
a black sun, surrounded.

2.
Speaker: In 1928
a further volume of poems appears – the last one. A new collection joins the
two previous ones also gathered here. “No more breath – the firmament swarms
with maggots” – : this line opens the cycle. The question about the wherefrom
becomes more urgent, more desperate – the poetry – in one of his essays he
calls it a plough – tears open the abyssal strata of time, the “black earth of
time” appears on the surface. The eye, talking with the perceived, and pained,
develops a new ability: it becomes visionary: it accompanies the poem into its
underground. The poem writes itself toward an other, a “strangest” time.

1. Speaker:
1 JANUARY1924

Whoever
kisses time’s sore brow

will
often, like a son, think tenderly

how
she, time, laid down to sleep outside

in
high heaped wheat drifts, in the corn.

Whoever
has raised the century’s eyelid

–
both slumber-apples, large and heavy – ,

hears
noise, hears the streams roar

the
lying times, relentlessly

Imperious
century, with loam-beautiful mouth

and
two apples, asleep – yet

before
it dies: to the son’s hand, so shrunken,

it
bends down its lip.

Life’s
breath, I know, ebbs away each day,

one
more small one, a small one – and

deceased
is the song of mortification, loam and plague,

with
lead they seal your mouth.

Oh
loam-and -life! Oh centrury’s death!

Only
to the one, I’m afraid, does its meaning reveal itself,

in
whom there was a smile, helpless – to the inheritor,

the
man who lost himself.

Oh
pain, oh to search for the lost word.

oh
lid and lid to raise, sick and weak,

for
generations, the strangest, with lime in your blood

to
gather the grass and the weed of night!

Time.
The lime in the blood of the sick son

turns
hard. Moscow, that
wooden coffer, sleeps.

Time,
the sovereign. And no escape anywhere...

The
snow’s apple-scent, as always.

The
sill here: I wish I could leave it.

Whereto?
The street – darkness.

And,
as if it were salt, so white, there on the pavement

lies
my conscience, spread out before me.

Through
winding lanes, through slipways

the
journey goes, somehow:

a
bad passenger sits in a sled,

pulls
a blanket over the knees.

The
lanes, the shimmering lanes, the by-lanes

the
runners crunch’s like apples under the tooth.

The
strap, I can’t grab it,

it
doesn’t want me to, and the hand is clammy.

Night,
carwoman, with what scrap and iron

are
you rolling through Moscow?

Fish
thud here, and there, from pink houses,

it
steams toward you – scalegold!

Moscow, anew. Ah, I greet you, once
more!

Forgive,
excuse – my misery wasn’t very great.

I
like to call them, as always, my brethren:

the
pike’s saying and the hard frost!

The
snow in the pharmacy’s raspberry light...

A
clattering, from afar, an Underwood...

The
coachman’s back... the roadway, blown away...

What
more do you want? They won’t kill you.

Winter
– beauty. And skyward the white,

the
starmilk – it streams, streams away and blinks.

The
horsehair blanket crunches along the icy

runners
– the horsehair blanket sings!

The
little lanes, smoking, the petroleum, always – :

swallowed
by snow,
raspberry colored.

They
hear the Soviet-sonatina jingle,

remember
the year twenty.

Does
it make me swear and damn?

–
The frost’s apple-scent, again –

Oh
oath that I swore to the fourth estate!

Oh
my promise, heavy with tears!

Oh
whom will you kill? Whom will you praise?

And
what lie, tell me, are you going to make up?

Tear
off this cartilage, the keys of the machine:

the
pike’s bones you lay open.

The
lime in the blood of the sick son: it fades.

A
laughter, blissful, frees itself –

Sonatas,
powerful... The little sonatina

of
the typewriter – : only its shadow!

2.
Speaker: That’s
how to escape contingency: through laughter. Through what we know as the poet’s
“senseless” laughter – through the absurd. And on the way there what does
appear – mankind is absent – has answered: the horsehair blanket has sung.

Poems
are sketches for Being: the poet lives according to them.

In
the thirties Osip Mandelstam is caught in the “purges.” The road leads to Siberia, where we lose his trace.

In
one of his last publications, “Journey to Armenia,”
published in 1932 in the Leningrad
magazine “Swesda,” we also find notes on the matters of poetry. In one of these
notes Mandelstam remembers his preference for the Latin Gerund.

The
Gerund ! that is the present participle of the passive form of the future.

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]